Félix Vallotton

Name

Félix Vallotton

Birth Year

1865

Death Year

1925

Country

France

Movement

Les Nabis

Félix Vallotton Biography

Félix Vallotton was born on December 28, 1865, in Lausanne, Switzerland, into a well-to-do middle-class family. At the age of seventeen, he came to Paris to enter the Académie Julian. He began his artistic career by painting portraits, one of which was exhibited at the 1885 semi-official Salon des Artistes Français, and then turned to interior scenes. It was during this period that Vallotton developed his own manner of painting: he worked with small, precise strokes, carefully rendering every detail and creating a smooth canvas surface. This is precisely why he is regarded as one of the precursors of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit ("new objectivity") movement, which originated in the 1920s.